100 million people

Last night, on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” fashion eye Carson pointed excitedly at a red, hammer and sickle T-shirt in a New York boutique. “Isn’t that great!” he gushed at the retro-CCCP logo. I winced.

For the past couple days, Andrew Sullivan has been fuming about the announcement that the U.S. postal service will honor Paul Robeson with a stamp next year.

David Failor, executive director of stamp services for the Postal Service, said there was strong support from the public for a stamp honoring Robeson, who was labeled a subversive for his mid-century activism against racism and anti-Semitism.

As Sullivan has noted, that wasn’t the reason Robeson was labeled a “subversive” - it was his unwavering allegiance for the communist cause. Robeson’s hero-worship of Stalin should be enough to disqualify him from any kind of national honor. Today Sullivan includes a long passage by Robeson and asks: “Would anyone who had written such things about Hitler in 1945 now be celebrated on a postage stamp?”

There is a critical disconnect between how Communism is viewed by the left and right in America. Since, in my opinion, the tenets of Communism are in step with the liberal positions of wealth redistribution and ubiquitous government control, it’s possible for stories like this to appear on the front page of the New York Times: “Leftist Causes Keep an Old-Age Home Active”

The library has an extensive collection of books on Marxism, Trotsky, Mao, and the Rosenbergs' trial, as well as the complete works of Shakespeare. There is a framed certificate from the American Civil Liberties Union honoring Sunset Hall's "tradition of activism" on one wall, a picture of Paul Robeson on another and, on a shelf, a bust of Lenin.

Aren’t those old commies adorable? The late columnist Michael Kelly observed: "If a Times reporter found a brave little band of aging Nazis, who kept a bust of Hitler in the living room and who declared that fascism would rise again, and wrote this up cute-well, this simply could never happen."

Conservatives, once again in my opinion, view the horrors of Mao and Stalin as equal to – if not worse – than the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis.

In his book, Death by Government, University of Hawaii professor R.J. Rummel catalogues the catastrophic record of the regimes so beloved by Sunset Hall residents. The Soviet Union, figures Rummel, killed somewhere between 28 million and 127 million people. His best estimate is 62 million. Even those who believe that Rummel's figures are exaggerated still offer mind-numbing figures - 20 million, according to French scholar Stephane Courtois's Black Book of Communism.

Rummel figures that the second most murderous regime, also surpassing the Nazis, was that of Mao Zedong. Rummel estimates that the communist Chinese killed somewhere between six million and 102 million people most likely about 35 million. Courtois actually puts Mao Zedong in first place, with between 45 million and 72 million dead. Rummel and Courtois also offer estimates for other great communist killers. Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, wiped out an estimated two million to 2.3 million people; the Vietnamese murdered 1 million to 1.7 million, while the North Korean regime killed 1.7 million to two million.

A hundred million people dead for a cause. The Communists starved and murdered a hundred million people with the help of Americans like Walter Duranty and Paul Robeson. That's the unvarnished, inescapable truth.